Chicago’s Leading Rolex Dealer Just Opened a 20,000-Square-Foot Megastore. Here’s a Look Inside.
When CD Peacock opened in downtown Chicago in 1837, the watch and jewelry store was the city’s first business. Last month, the company added another superlative to its illustrious history when it celebrated the grand opening of its new flagship, the CD Peacock Mansion, at Oakbrook Center in Oak Brook, Ill., about 20 miles west of downtown Chicago. At 20,000 square feet, it is one of the largest jewelry and watch stores in the world.
“All the employees are given white Adidas sneakers because it’s so big that they’re running around all the time,” vice chairman Steven Holtzman tells Robb Report. “There was an opportunity to go big in Chicago and this was always my dream.”
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That may be the understatement of the year. With two stories, multiple entrances, a full-service circular bar and an array of private and semi-private spaces, including a proposal room, the mansion feels more like a luxe contemporary department store than a traditional jewelry and watch boutique.
“We built this to really make it a destination — everything is about the experience,” Holtzman says. “You feel like you’re walking into the Galeries Lafayette or something like that because it’s not like you’re walking into a jewelry store.”
And yet the high-end brands sold at CD Peacock — including Rolex, Omega, Tudor, Cartier, Chanel, Breguet, Vhernier, Roberto Coin, Anita Ko and Fope — represent the crème de la crème of the jewelry and watch business.
The mansion’s 2,800-square-foot Rolex shop-in-shop spans two floors, with its own entrance. The flagship is also home to an Omega boutique, the eighth Tudor boutique in the country as well as a Cartier Espace, the French maison’s term for a salon that’s bigger than a shop-in-shop but not quite its own boutique (here, it clocks in at just under 1,000 square feet).
The grand opening on May 16 was the culmination of a watchmaking career that, for Holtzman, began on the brand side. From 1999 to 2008, he served as founder and president of Roger Dubuis North America. In 2005, he founded his own boutique brand, Maîtres du Temps, and was based in Switzerland. In 2021, Holtzman and his wife, Qi, moved back to the United States after Holtzman’s father, Seymour, who’d bought CD Peacock from the Canadian retailer Birks in 1993, announced that he was retiring and convinced his son to run the business
“I was not a store operator, but in the things that I’ve done in the past, I had some great personal experiences creating Roger Dubuis and then creating my own brand,” Holtzman says. “All of the things that I was able to see with both of those opportunities allowed me to look at things from a different perspective. Instead of looking at it like your typical family jeweler or a big group like Watches of Switzerland or Bucherer, I was able to look at it with the perspective of being a brand.”
A striking feature of the megastore is the preponderance of rounded walls and circular elements designed to lend the space a sense of flow. “That was 100% intentional,” Holtzman says. “If you could see the box that was here before. We wanted to have curves. We didn’t want to have corners. In every area, we worked hard at it.”
To hear Holtzman tell it, the mansion, which had its soft opening just before the start of Watches and Wonders Geneva in April, has already generated quite a bit of buzz among the brands he once competed with.
“Before we opened up, all the brands that we had were here doing their setup,” he says. “So to go to Geneva and listen to the chatter from everybody that was here… I was just at the Kentucky Derby with Matthias [Breschan] from Longines and I mean, everybody that comes through this place goes, ‘Oh, my God. There’s nothing like this.’”
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